On Assignment - Season 7

Season 7

Episodes

Episode 1
This time James Mates profiles Viktor Orbán's right wing populist government in Hungary ahead of the 2019 European elections. John Irvine visits Egypt's latest mega-project, Sisi's £35 billion new capital city 30 miles east of ancient Cairo, the first phase of which is set to open this year but for now is still under construction. And Nina Nannar speaks to the female stars of the stunt industry - as their roles and numbers increase. But with new threats of technology, robots and CGI - what does the future these women have fought so hard for look like?

Episode 2
This time, Neil Connery asks, ‘What next for the Kurds?' As the largest stateless nation in the world comes to a crossroads. He meets female Peshmerga fighters and celebrates Newroz, the Kurdish New Year, alongside 25,000 people in the mountains. Rachel Younger visits the unique Danish community of Christiania, which prides itself on consensus and sustainability but is increasingly becoming an area of tension. And Rebecca Barry travels to Sweden to meet the people getting microchips put under their skin to use as personal ID badges or even as self-scanning credit cards. She visits an office where 10 per cent of the workforce are now chipped and asks if this is the future.

Episode 3
Paul Davies returns to Croatia, 28 years after his award-winning reports on the siege of Dubrovnik to discover how much has changed for this UNESCO world-heritage site and tourist hotspot. Emma Murphy ventures outside of her comfort zone to the 'National Radio Quiet Zone' in West Virginia. And Penny Marshall travels to Gothenburg and Stockholm to observe how the famously open-minded Swedes are tackling the final taboo: Death.

Episode 4
Steve Scott travels to Jamaica to meet the Reggae Girlz. The island's football team for the women's World Cup qualified against the odds and now the whole country is behind them. Rageh Omaar spends time with the Russian families who have received the Order of Parental Glory - awarded to Russia's largest - and as the President would have it - most patriotic families. Plus, Debi Edward explores the increasingly popular world of pigeon racing in China.

Episode 5
Neil Connery visits the defunct Chernobyl nuclear reactor, while survivors of the 1986 accident give their take on Ukraine's booming trade in disaster tourism. Juliet Bremner joins the locals in Chennai battling over the city's limited supplies of water and looks at some of the solutions put forward by authorities, while Kylie Pentelow reports on a new divorce law in Denmark.

Episode 6
Carl Dinnen investigates the controversial use by police in Detroit of facial recognition software, which is said to misidentify African-American faces at higher rates than white ones. Tom Clarke travels to Colombia to meet a man fighting to save South America's elusive pink river dolphins from extinction, while Lucrezia Milarini is in Berlin, where the city council has approved drastic measures to curb surging rents. Current affairs programme, presented by Rageh Omaar.

Episode 7
Tom Clarke travels to Greenland to find out what it was about the country that caught Donald Trump's eye when earlier this year he suggested that America might want to buy the island from Denmark.
Richard Pallot travels to Amsterdam to investigate how party-tourism is making the city unbearable for many of the locals. The red light district is often overwhelmed by huge crowds and the authorities now issue on the spot fines to drunken and stoned visitors that litter the streets at night.
Plus, Nina Nannar is in Paris trying out a ‘rage room', the new global craze of releasing tension through destruction.

Episode 8
On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Romanian revolution, Paul Davies returns to Bucharest, where he and the ITN team were the only international reporters to gain access to the country's main TV station as the revolution gained momentum. He returns to the television studio he reported from meeting old friends, key players in the uprising and listens as survivors recount their disappointment in the uprising's outcome.
Jerusalem has an unusual problem... there are not enough places to bury their dead. For Jews, Muslims and Christians alike, its soil is sacred. The city needs more than 4,000 new graves every year. With sought-after plots costing tens of thousands of pounds, the latest solution is to dig downwards – John Irvine visits the new six-storey underground burial site.
And Penny Marshall spends time with British Christian missionary Pete Portal and his South African wife Sarah who run two safe houses and rehabilitation centres in the Cape Flat's troubled Manenberg district. Their Tree of Life church welcomes in gangsters and drug addicts seeking a cleaner life.
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